Coffeeland
One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
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Narrated by:
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Jason Culp
About this listen
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Extremely wide-ranging and well researched . . . In a tradition of protest literature rooted more in William Blake than in Marx.”—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
The epic story of how coffee connected and divided the modern world
Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world. But few coffee drinkers know this story. It centers on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of Manchester, England, founded one of the world’s great coffee dynasties at the turn of the twentieth century. Adapting the innovations of the Industrial Revolution to plantation agriculture, Hill helped turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history—a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality, and violence. In the process, both El Salvador and the United States earned the nickname “Coffeeland,” but for starkly different reasons, and with consequences that reach into the present.
Provoking a reconsideration of what it means to be connected to faraway people and places, Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism.
©2020 Augustine Sedgewick (P)2020 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
“[A] beautifully written, engaging and sprawling portrait of how coffee made modern El Salvador, while it also helped to remake consumer habits worldwide.”—Lizabeth Cohen, New York Times Book Review
“Throughly engrossing . . . [Sedgewick's] literary gifts and prodigious research make for a deeply satisfying reading experience studded with narrative surprise.”—Michael Pollan, bestselling author of This is Your Mind on Plants
“Extremely wide-ranging and well researched, Sedgewick’s story reaches out into American political history, not to mention the history of American breakfast, but it is mostly set in El Salvador, where a large-scale monoculture of coffee began, at the turn of the twentieth century, under the fiendishly brilliant direction of a British expat named James Hill [. . .] The originality and ambition of Sedgewick’s work is that he insistently sees the dynamic between producer and consumer—Central American peasant and North American proletarian—not merely as one of exploited and exploiter but as a manufactured co-dependence between two groups both exploited by capitalism.”—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
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Originally written in French, The Conquest of Bread first appeared as a series of articles in the anarchist journal Le Révolté. It was first published in Paris with a preface by Élisée Reclus, who also suggested the title. Between 1892 and 1894, it was serialized in part in the London journal Freedom, of which Kropotkin was a co-founder. In the work, Kropotkin points out what he considers to be the defects of the economic systems of feudalism and capitalism and why he believes they thrive on and maintain poverty and scarcity.
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If we were all perfect. That's a big if.
- By DesmoProfundis on 06-07-21
By: Peter Kropotkin
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The Conquest of Bread
- By: Pyotr Kropotkin
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Conquest of Bread, first published in 1892, Kropotkin set out his ideas on how his heightened idealism could work. It was all the more extraordinary because he was born into an aristocratic land-owning family - with some 1,200 male serfs - though from his student years his liberal views and his fixation on the need for social change saw him take a revolutionary path. This led rapidly to decades of exile. It is a passionate, even a fierce polemic for dramatic social change.
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“All is for All”
- By Gabriel on 01-02-19
By: Pyotr Kropotkin
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Ramp Hollow
- The Ordeal of Appalachia
- By: Steven Stoll
- Narrated by: Brian Sutherland
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Appalachia - among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America - has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise, and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in US history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common.
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Almost unlistenable
- By Golf Fan on 09-13-18
By: Steven Stoll
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An Empire of Wealth
- The Epic History of American Economic Power
- By: John Steele Gordon
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout time, from ancient Rome to modern Britain, the great empires built and maintained their domination through force of arms and political power. But not the United States. America has dominated the world in a new, peaceful, and pervasive way - through the continued creation of staggering wealth. In this authoritative, engrossing history, John Steele Gordon captures as never before the true source of our nation's global influence: wealth and the capacity to create more of it.
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KNOW YOUR HISTORY!
- By CP Guy on 12-22-20
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A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
- A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
- By: Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore
- Narrated by: Simon Mattacks
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism.
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A remarkable exposé & synthesis of the Ponzi scheme that capitalism is and always has been.
- By Scott on 02-10-18
By: Raj Patel, and others
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Socialism Sucks
- Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
- By: Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 4 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The bastard step-child of Milton Friedman and Anthony Bourdain, Socialism Sucks is a bar crawl through former, current, and wannabe socialist countries around the world. Free-market economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell travel to countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and Sweden to investigate the dangers and idiocies of socialism - while drinking a lot of beer.
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I learned more than I anticipated in a 4 + hr book
- By J D Rossi on 08-06-19
By: Robert Lawson, and others
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Animal, Vegetable, Junk
- A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
- By: Mark Bittman
- Narrated by: Mark Bittman
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of humankind is usually told as one of technological innovation and economic influence—of arrowheads and atomic bombs, settlers and stock markets. But behind it all, there is an even more fundamental driver: Food. In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, trusted food authority Mark Bittman offers a panoramic view of how the frenzy for food has driven human history to some of its most catastrophic moments.
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Mostly Junk
- By Daniel Ducat on 05-22-21
By: Mark Bittman
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Fordlandia
- The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City
- By: Greg Grandin
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 15 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Fordlandia by National Book Award finalist Greg Grandin tells the enthralling tale of Henry Ford’s failed attempts to transform a Connecticut-sized chunk of Brazilian rainforest into a homespun slice of American utopia.
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An eye-opening account of an arrogant man's folly
- By Melissa on 09-17-13
By: Greg Grandin
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich
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A History of the World in 6 Glasses
- By: Tom Standage
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout human history, certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. As Tom Standage relates with authority and charm, six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course of history, becoming the defining drink during a pivotal historical period. A History of the World in 6 Glasses tells the story of humanity from the Stone Age to the 21st century through the lens of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola.
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Fun and Informative
- By Stoker on 09-09-11
By: Tom Standage
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Sweetness and Power
- The Place of Sugar in Modern History
- By: Sidney W. Mintz
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this eye-opening study, Sidney W. Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar and reveals how closely interwoven sugar's origins are as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies, with its use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat.
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Dated but still worthwhile
- By Acteon on 11-14-19
By: Sidney W. Mintz
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Capitalism and Slavery
- Third Edition
- By: Eric Williams
- Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development.
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Excellent Historical Reading for the Caribbean
- By Trinirastawoman on 06-01-22
By: Eric Williams
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The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, Second Edition
- By: Marc Levinson
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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From modest beginnings as a tea shop, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company became the largest retailer in the world. It was a juggernaut, with nearly 16,000 stores. But its explosive growth made it a mortal threat to mom-and-pop grocery stores across the nation. Main Street fought back tooth and nail, leading the Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman administrations to investigate the Great A&P. In a remarkable court case, the government pressed criminal charges against the company for selling food too cheaply - and won.
By: Marc Levinson
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I absolutely adore this book with one fatal flaw
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Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation.
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What listeners say about Coffeeland
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Adam Watts
- 11-22-23
Slow burn
Started off bored for the first few pages, but then expanded and ventured into unexpected directions
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- EM
- 07-29-20
Came to learn of coffee, learned so much MORE!
I am a Christ-follower with a desire to make this world a better place. While I am an outsider to the hospitality supply chain of coffee from earth to cup to lips, I see a great opportunity to utilize this gracious beverage as a vehicle to impact lives for the better through discipleship. Visit our FB page, International Coffee Cooperative, to join in the conversation and add your perspective.
Reading this coffee history and it's focus on the Hill family and El Salvador, I have been blessed seeing the struggle of others and some triumphs we have gained as a history of relationships and labor and comfort. This book has been a useful education into the scene behind the sip...and like Jaime Hill, I will never be the same.
I highly recommend this book! The thorough research and depth of the coffee story is highly beneficial to our understanding of what we as consumers enjoy because of the work of others.
I listened to the Audible version but plan to buy the hardbound book for my library.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Dan Fenyvesi
- 12-02-21
Superb history
Lively book that relates a grand historical narrative spanning a century+ using one export crop, coffee, and one family as a central focus. I loved it!
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2 people found this helpful
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- jorge l pomalaza raez
- 06-14-20
A must read for every coffee drinker!
From now on, I will never see or drink my cup of coffee the same way I did before.
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2 people found this helpful
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- SAM
- 05-11-21
I love coffee
A absorbing story of coffee in El Salvador from the early days of an English settler to the struggle of the poor native workers trying to eke out life on the plantations.
It isn’t a pretty history but thanks to one family member we can learn.
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2 people found this helpful
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- DTB
- 05-02-20
2 Stories in One
This book is amazing! It tells the story of coffee and of United States history. I learned about how US citizens treated Latin Americans in their own countries. I learned about the many good things that President Hoover did. I learned about the science behind coffee and caffeine. There is so much here in just-One book.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Wilkins White
- 09-20-24
Rough start, but gets better
Starts out a bit rough. Lots of disparate annecdotes that don't seem to be relevant. If you stick with it, the second half is more engaging.
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- Dale Sarver
- 04-06-22
very interesting
the history of coffee and how it impacted the history of Central America thru the years. very informative. an independent view of El salvodor.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 01-01-23
revealing
Well told, and an interesting story. The history is fascinating, something everyone who has experienced coffee should know.
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1 person found this helpful
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- l
- 07-16-22
Superb narration by Jason Culp
An important story, and the narration by Jason Culp is excellent. The issues are important and troubling.
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1 person found this helpful